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2:16 p.m. - 2004-05-12
lovely words
This is a long but wonderful musing by Myles Werntz. I don't usually post other people's words on my web log but this was just so...great. Enjoy.

Being 26 presents problems, especially if you�re in a college town. You�re too old to date college girls, unless they�re a collegiate looking for an aged Merlot in the midst of real cheap wine coolers. You�re nearing the cutoff date for growing your hair out, unless you�re in a band or working in youth ministry. You�re expected to shave daily, barring an early winter. You�ve lost your cutting edge of blistering youth as you are on the rusty side of the 20s.

And worst of all, you start wanting good coffee.

Gone are the days when any old coffee will do. You start wanting good stuff. Real stuff, hand-washed Jamaican Blue�, grown by 3rd generation farmers who learned how to cultivate culinary masterpieces by Juan Valdez�s grandfather. The GOOD stuff.

There was a day when the gas station was as good as it got� that a cool night, a clear sidewalk, and a nearby gas station were all that was needed for a cheap date. College brought me lifetimes of memories of how to walk to the gas station for what in retrospect was probably powder cappuccino and hot water. But now, at 26, I have become what I feared: the coffee snob. And the worst part about it is that my own coffee doesn�t live up to my own poor standards. It�s most likely the Waco water, which is nutritious, words that should NEVER be applied to water. It�s amazing what �natural additives�, a.k.a. cow deposits, do for the aftertaste of your mocha java frap.

Twenty-six. You start wanting the better things of life. You start dreaming of your first new car, the first place where your name is on a mortgage, furniture that wasn�t first holding milk. It�s the age at which you cling desperately to the vestiges of coolness, listening to the Police on full volume, ignoring the stares. Meanwhile, Sting has gone from punk icon to soft-rock chairman.

You start wanting stability, faithfulness� not only from yourself, but also from the world around you. It�s more than wanting a permanent address; it�s wanting Van Morrison to not go out of fashion again, or needing Ani DiFranco to be a little more mainstream. It�s wanting your life to be able to move in tandem with someone else�s, if only for forty years or so.

It�s wanting your life to fit in without giving in. It�s wanting your life to be more than a collection of cultural references, and needing it to be a marker towards something greater than yourself.

This morning, I woke up with the rain coming down in sheets. I was supposed to go shoot a local race for the Waco paper, but with rain drowning out the most diehard of runners, I turned over and reached for Sportscenter. The rain was also canceling out the youth garage sale that was supposed to happen today, so until 3 p.m., I found myself at free reign.

I sit upon the precipitous edge of another new beginning. This past year was geared towards beginning graduate school somewhere, but having no offers on the table. I have begun to formulate a backup plan for life. Most likely, it will involve reapplying for next fall, reading and writing a lot, sweating out another year at Barnes and Noble and being in Waco. Mostly my life is a beautiful creation, and I eat it up like a fat kid on cake. But on days like this, with hours to go until 3 p.m., when work will claim the rest of my night, my life seems like a soft belly between the glory of youth and the flabby arms of middle age.

It just gets long. The minutes drone on when I�m in the midst of work, and flee when I�m in middling joy. Time is not on my side. It gets longest on rainy days like today when even nature seems to be saying, �Yeah, I can�t wait for Monday morning either, because this weekend has really blown.� These are the mornings that I watch the sky for meteor showers at noon, hoping maybe today will be the day that a sunburst will envelope my car, or that maybe today is the day that Pearl Jam�s tour bus breaks down in front of my house, lost and looking for a place to crash for the evening.

There�s a time and place for everything, including the doldrums. If not for the middling days, there�d be no reason to appreciate the blockbuster days. I would never remember the night that I drank wine by the lake with a cool breeze in my face; it�d be only �one of those nights when I drank wine by the lake � oh which one was it �� There�d be no significance to any particularly wonderful moment without the purely boring ones to cast it into relief.

But what if this is like saying that tragedy makes joy all the more precious, as if tragedy is the natural state of life; the par place of existence, so that joy becomes all the more unnatural, an ecstatic presence in the midst of an utterly defeated place? Is saying that the boring days make the great ones really great a cheap way of defending the 75% of my life that wouldn�t make good television? I�m not saying that even my best days are the stuff of sitcom history, but at least they make for great memories. Is relegating the majority of my life to the realm of �despairing but necessary� an acceptable way for me to give up?

Have I given up on having each day be a memorable experience, one more stone on the Via Dolorosa? What is it that I am really waiting for?

If some days are destined for mediocrity to make palatable days seem like diamonds, there is more at stake here than simple malaise. What is at stake is my life, lived like a long string of pre-game shows before an annual Super Bowl. What is at stake here is nothing less than my life.

I�m 26, on the edge of greatness. I�m living a life that I enjoy; I�m not trapped into a job for the sake of having a job, and living a life that I would not trade for any other. I love what I do; I love my family and friends; I live for God.

Even on rainy days.

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